Astute assessments of an evolving nation and ideal reading for November voters.
National Book Award winner Remini (The House, 2006, etc.) boils down U.S. history, illuminating the present.
This neat survey begins and ends in uncertainty. Who were the first inhabitants of the New World? Is the United States now on the verge of irreparable decline? As can be expected from a biographer of Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as the official historian of the House of Representatives, Remini serves up American history with a heavy dose of big-name politics. After a patronizing account of the continent’s earliest inhabitants (“these natives were limited in what they could do by the fact that they had not invented the wheel”), he zips through the colonial period, the Revolution and the early 19th century. Americans, he explains, only achieved their distinct national identity after the War of 1812. The Jacksonian era then receives generous treatment. Remini remarks that Jackson transformed the executive branch by demonstrating that “all it takes is a President with determination, popular support, and leadership skills to direct both domestic and foreign policy and decide the future course of American history.” John Quincy Adams had previously warned that the United States must not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Nevertheless, after the Civil War, America emerged as an industrialized nation unwisely eager to spread freedom and democracy to other parts of the globe. One consequence of its continued involvement in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By the end of the 20th century, successive presidents had ignored the constitutional jurisdiction of Congress over declarations of war. Following 9/11, President Bush made “one of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes ever committed by the United States”: the invasion of Iraq. In 2008, Americans face war, terrorism, recession and the rising economies of China and India. Yet the author avers there is still reason to hope for good leadership.
Astute assessments of an evolving nation and ideal reading for November voters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-083144-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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